by Gow, Kailin
“If the pixies hadn't meddled,” my mother added waspishly. She loved to read and hear about the stories of the great Undivided Kingdom, and it was a singular affront to her fairy pride that, some two centuries ago, a devious pixie prince had persuaded the brother of the reigning Fairy King to assassinate the reigning monarch and take over Feyland for himself. The resulting struggle between the king's son and his traitorous brother had led to a war that only dividing up Winter and Summer territories to the king's brother and son, respectively, could resolve – a war that, while so long ago that many fairies didn't believe it had ever occurred, still rankled deep in my mother's patriotic heart.
It is funny to think, Breena, how you grew up reading about the American Revolution and the War of 1832 the three world wars and other such events (of which, I confess, I know little) about your world, and yet were raised with no knowledge of the lore of the kingdom to which you, by your blood and your spirit, more truly belong!
“Well,” my mother said, “hopefully your match will be strategic and fruitful. Love-matches are, as you ought to well know, not part of the equation – nonetheless, I confess that I am glad that you have some fondness for the Summer girl, for as dangerous as passion can be, neither your father nor I wishes to see you matched to someone you find odious.”
“It wouldn't be so bad,” my father joked. “Having an odious wife didn't work out so badly for me!” He gave my mother a wink as he took her hand; her moon-white skin showed the faintest hint of color.
Yes, my mother's weakness for my father was at once her greatest happiness and her greatest regret. In her love for him, she knew, she could never be like the Queen Tamara of old, who had never loved any man, and whose powers were – as a result – more powerful than any queen seen since. Yet, even as she regretted that she was unable to be as bravely unselfish as the queens of old, nothing could bring a smile to her face as quickly as a remark – loving, sweet, patient – of my father's. How I miss that mother of mine now – the mother whose enduring love, that tiny remaining part of her, gave her the warmth to be a kind mother as well as a great warrior.
Perhaps I have inherited from my mother her great weakness, then. For just as her love for my father, she felt, weakened her – so too does my love for you outstrip all my other, nobler desires. I want only to feel your skin upon mine once again, to wrap my arms around you and pretend that we are once again in our fairy orchard, eating star-fruits and letting the nectar flow down our fingers, safe from the world, safe from its cruelty and its hardships.
Writing this to you, Breena, I feel that much closer to you. The distance of miles and treaties and borders that separates us feels like nothing compared to the love this missive bears towards you. I will furl up the letter like a scroll and tie it around the horn of a winged unicorn – bearing the standard of peace – and I will send the letter forth to your Summer Palace. When you read this letter, go – if it has sufficiently stirred your memory – find our secret orchard, and sit there a while. Let the taste of star fruit linger on your tongue and there, if you can bear it, think of me. If my letter has restored to you that one memory – sweeter than star fruit itself! - then it will have been a success.
Your loving,
Kian
Letter 4
My Dearest Breena,
There are so many gaps in your memory that I must now fill! I know that it was necessary for Flametail to wipe your memory when you left Feyland – how could anyone live in the Land Beyond the Crystal River still longing with such a shuddering ache for the beauty of Feyland? I know such a longing would consume me alive! - and yet I regret that you are unable to share with me those happy memories of our childhood together, a love that, while far more innocent than (I confess – if you will pardon my boldness and weakness for your beauty) my love is now, was no less pronounced. I admit that I was somewhat of an anomaly among the other boys at the Winter Court. Quite a few of them were engaged, too, having been promised in similarly political marriages to minor members of the Spring and Autumn courts, but it was the fashion among these boys to scoff and jeer at the young Duchesses and Countesses to which their hearts and hands had been entrusted. Never mind that few among them had even seen their intended brides! They made a contest of insisting that their betrothed was the ugliest, the meanest, the most slovenly, and the stupidest in all of Feyland – one swore up and down that he was being forced to marry a Spring Duchess who was not really a fairy at all, but really a noxious toad able of glamouring into human form (a form, he insisted, that was not at all convincing and in fact still bore the distinct remnant of toadiness). Another, equally insistent, told us that his intended had three legs, one of which was withered like a rotten log, and had tiny red eyes and breath that smelled like lightlizard dung. It was something of a badge of pride for these boys to consider themselves brave and strong enough to face these horrendous creatures – no less than if they were gearing up to stare them down in battle.
But you will be happy to know, Breena darling, that I was not one of these boys. While young Berrythorn was bemoaning his engagement to Peachblossom the Pungent and even your old nemesis Flynn was lamenting being yoked to Helena the Horrific-Looking (who was, as I later discovered, in fact heralded as the prettiest maiden in the Autumn Kingdom), I was more than pleased with my parents' choice of my intended. Indeed, I may even have bragged once or twice about how much cleverer my intended was to poor old Peachblossom. Luckily I had my princely status about me, or else I wager I would hardly have expected quite a beating from my comrades for my refusal to take part in their competition of maladies. But they knew my rank well enough not to engage me in any rancor, and while I did get a fair boyish share of teasing at my refusal to insult or bemoan my intended, it was far more restrained than it might have been. I felt no shame nor regret at being betrothed – for I remembered you well, and the image of your shining eyes had been so well burned in my heart that it felt as if you were mine already, and I yours: the engagement, that upon which my mother and your father had decided, was a mere formality: I already felt, deep within my bones, that you and I were already betrothed. You and I already shared that bond that, as I grew older, I would learn to identify as love.
The next year, you arrived to pay a similar visit at the Winter Court, accompanied (much to my mother's disdain) by your mother Raine. The official stated reason for your visit was to give the Winter Court a chance to reciprocate the generosity that your family had shown to mine, but – as my mother pointed out – it was far more likely that the real reason for your visit was Redleaf's anger at Raine, who still remained in the royal court, beloved of your father. “Imagine,” my mother said, “us playing host to the king's concubine!”
Yet when your mother arrived with you in tow, flanked by a royal retinue of maids and valets, her natural gaiety and frank smile were more than a match for my mother's wariness. If my mother had been contemptuous of Flametail and Redleaf, she had no sooner met your mother than she began to take a more generous stance towards the mocked “concubine.” The two of them would be obliged to sit watching us as we made snow angels and mountains of frost down which to sled, and – in that sitting – they developed something akin to a friendship.
I remember overhearing their conversation one day that summer. “How do you do it?” your mother asked. “Balance it – being a queen and being a mother? I spend my days in the palace, trying to find some role for myself, and it's all I can do to protect Breena from the plots and anger against her – even her father...” Raine sighed. “Frank – Flametail's – a good man, and I love him, but he can be so blind to how dangerous the court can be, how dangerous...some people can be.”
“You speak of Redleaf,” my mother said.
Raine blushed. “Yes,” she said. “I know my presence is not wanted in the Summer Court. I know I've made a few mistakes in my life. When I met Frank – in the human world – I didn't know any of this. I didn't know that he was a king, that he was (for goodness's sake!) a fai
ry, that he was (and here she blushed) already betrothed to another. Even if it is just a political marriage,” she added hurriedly. “I just thought he was the man that I fell in love with.”
“Love is a dangerous thing,” my mother said wryly.
“And yet I can't regret it.” Raine looked out to where you were burrowing into the snow, creating a little house of ice and frost. You called me over to play, but I was engrossed in the conversation – I got so little insight into the workings of the adult world that to hear my mother and yours talk so seemed like a rare chance to learn of all those mysterious concepts - “love,” “danger,” “passion,” about which my mother always spoke in such hushed tones. “I can regret falling in love with Frank; I can regret coming to Feyland, even, as beautiful as it is here. But I can't regret my daughter. There isn't a thing in the world I wouldn't do for her.”
She looked up at my mother and their eyes met and, for a moment, I saw in my mother's eyes a fierce, protective love – not her dispassionate patriotism, her love of Feyland, but a specific, tiger-like love for me, her son. “I know exactly what you mean,” she said softly.
“I just feel...” Raine laughed. “I'm sorry – I shouldn't be burdening you with this. You're a Queen – you have affairs of state to deal with – you don't care about...”
To my surprise, my mother took Raine's hand. “I talk politics and strategies with my husband. With my ladies-in-waiting too I recount stories of the kings and queens of old, and discuss fairy politics. There is not one woman or man in all of Feyland with whom I discuss my child. It is good to hear – from another mother. I won't lie – I believe you were foolish to come here. You were foolish to get embroiled in fairy passion. But your foolishness was the foolishness of all your race – you know, here in Feyland love was once called the “human sickness?””
Raine sighed. “Indeed,” she whispered. “And yet are you not sick, too? For your husband? For your son? For your daughter Shasta?”
My mother looked down. “It is my duty not to be.” But her expression softened. “It is hard,” she said. “I know that if one day my son or my husband were in battle, and it fell to me to give the order to send them on a mission on which they would surely be killed, and if that mission could save our land – it would be my duty to do it. It would be my duty to give that order and let them die – for the good of the land. But could I do it?”
Raine shook her head. “Listening to you talk,” she said, “makes me glad I'm not a fairy. I know I couldn't.” Her eyes filled with tears. “Every day at the Summer Court...I have to worry, have to look behind me. Is one of Redleaf's servants – like her advisor, Wort – is one of them going to poison me, or worse – poison Bree? I have to have all our food tested. I sneak out of my bedchamber – the official Concubine's Residence, which has come to feel like a cage to me – and tiptoe down to the nursery and sleep on the floor beside Breena's bed. Just in case. Just in case some angry Autumn courtier decides it would be so easy to just pick her up and let her fall...she's so small.”
“I've heard the tale of the kelpie,” said my mother. “Great magic – your daughter is lucky to possess it. If she can repel one of those, my dear, she can repel any fairy plot.”
“It's still so strange to me,” said Raine. “My daughter isn't like me – she isn't human. Not really, anyway. This little girl – not more than four years old and already she looks eight or nine at least. Already she walks and talks and plays like a girl twice or three times her age – and your boy, too. They're so old for their age. I know fairies grow faster than humans – I was told what to expect – but there's something rather frightening in seeing her grow up so fast.”
“It will settle,” said my mother. “They shoot up until they're about Kian's age, nine – and then their adolescence lasts all the way until they are sixteen or thereabouts. She won't look like an old crone before she's fifteen – I promise you that! Although Shasta!” My mother sighed. Shasta was taller than I was – though some years younger, she had the strength and vigor of a fairy four or five times her age and experience in fighting. She had insisted on learning all the traditional boys' lessons – fencing and fighting and, most scandalously, cooking. Hunting – the taking of life and the renewal of life as food – was seen in the kingdom as a uniquely male provenance, even as the forging of weapons – the act of creation – was that of women. (I understand, Breena, that in your world the situation is somewhat different), and although my mother and father alike tried to dissuade her we often found Shasta sneaking into the palace kitchens, her gaze fixed upon the burly men chopping and roasting and braising the meats of Feyland.
Yet cooking did not interest me – nor did it interest you, as far as I recall. Rather, we shared one particular love among all the fairy accomplishments: that of art. You displayed, I remember, a talent that far outshone your age. You knew how to mix the paints – glimmering magical pots of color and light – and apply them delicately to stone walls or to canvases.
The greatest fairy artists, they say, are able to do far more than depict life – they are able to create it. The beauty of their images is so strong, so clear and bright, that they are able to create doorways between the world of art and the world of life – between the world in which they stand and the worlds they paint and imagine. Indeed, legend says that the famous crossing Beyond the Crystal River is not a doorway at all, but rather a painting painted by a master artist – a painting of the human world, crafted in memory of a human woman he adored. His love and passion were so strong, his desire so great, that in his brush-strokes he wielded a great and sacred magic, a magic that broke apart the boundaries between the two worlds and allowed those who knew where to find the portrait to pass safely from one land into another. While I was never so great, I found that my magic painting too did, if not break, then nevertheless weaken the divide between our two worlds. Long after you had gone, I painted your face, and at times – at night – that face would seem to move and change – smile, laugh, cry, and even grow as you were growing in the human world. It was not a mere static image but a living one: three-dimensional, filled with flesh and blood, a true connection to the beloved whom it depicted.
I wonder, sometimes, about your painting. Your talent was prodigious, although you were too young to attain the kind of mastery I later learned. What if you had stayed longer in the palace, Breena? What if you had learned more of fairy art? Could you have learned how to build bridges between our two worlds – could those portraits I know you painted of me in your adolescence have come to life, despite not being crafted with fairy paints; could those images of Feyland have recalled you home – to and with me, where you belonged? I dream sometimes of your finding your way back to me – some summer evening – painting our secret orchard and then slipping with me through our paintings into such a world? Perhaps the paintings, at least, would have jolted your memories – reversed the forgetting-spell placed upon you when you left Feyland to alleviate the pain of your departure – and then, when you remembered all that you had left behind, you would – perhaps – have called to me.
And I would have heard you.
Letter 5
My Dearest Breena,
How happy I was in those days! How happy we both were! We barely understood what it meant to be engaged, but yet we shared in the promise of our shared future a unique and unspeakable bond. How fondly I recall the last few weeks we shared together, when you were staying with us at the Winter Court, your mother and mine forging a similar bond as they watched us grow together. How idyllic life seemed to me then – I forgot about the mysterious goings-on of the outside world: wars and rebellions and chaos and troubles that my mother and father had sometimes hinted at in hushed tones. I forgot that I was destined to be a fighter, a warrior – I wanted only to remain in the happy cocoon of childhood, nestled there together with you, studying art and playing games of telepathy and experiencing the kind of childhood to which I, as a fairy and as a Prince, was never really entitled.
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br /> The first rumblings of discord came a few months after Raine's and your arrival at the Winter Court. Raine was on her knees, trying in vain to plead with us to stop painting (our painting had turned into playful roughhousing, and the walls of the nursery and our clothing alike was covered in shimmering fairy paint) and to come downstairs for dinner. “Is this how a little prince behaves?” She tried to shake a wagging, disapproving finger at us both, but her expression made clear that her sympathies were fully with our own.
“Five more minutes!” we pleaded in chiming unison. “Just let us finish this one painting.” We were working together on a grand map of Feyland, one that showed the Summer and Winter castles side by side, each beautiful and majestic, shining with the magic of the paints.
Just as Raine was on the verge of giving in, her smiling expression making clear that we had won her over with our twinned eagerness, my mother strode in, her expression firm and icy.
“I must speak with you immediately,” she turned to Raine. “There is no time! Hurry!” She gave us a pointed look. “Stay there!” she commanded me, in a voice that made it clear she would be far less inflexible than Raine had been. She turned on her heel and marched out, Raine scurrying after her.
“What's going on?” you asked me.
Of course, as terrifying as my mother's silvery stare was, no amount of maternal pressure, regal or otherwise, was going to get in the way of sating my curiosity. Trading our intentions in a quick stream of telepathic thoughts, we crept down the corridor, using all the magical powers we possessed to silence our footsteps, until we were close enough to hear my mother and Raine, who were conversing in hushed tones on the landing of the staircase.
